Entries tagged with 'cocktails'
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Bartending School in Arlington, Virginia. [Flickr: Larry Miller] Across the country, students ranging from pre-K to post-grad are putting the summer behind them and settling into the school routine, which makes it a good time to talk about bartending education. There's no shortage of bartending schools out there. Unfortunately, as my blogging bartender friends Darcy O’Neil and Jeffrey Morgenthaler have noted, enrolling in a bartending school is typically a waste of time and money. Morgenthaler, who has built a small empire of web traffic by posting unintentionally hilarious how-to videos from the American Bartending School on his site, wrote to an aspiring bartender: “You don't become a doctor, lawyer, or architect straight out of school, and the same goes...
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How many drinks have you tried on Anvil’s list? [Photographs: Paul Clarke and Robyn Lee] The 100 Classic Cocktails To Try Before You Die list began making the rounds last week but it's different from your average internet meme. While it's popping up all over on blogs and Twitter, the list originated as a menu recently introduced at Anvil, a craft-cocktail bar in Houston. Created by co-owner Robert Heugel and his Anvil partners, the selection of drinks (simply known as “the list") doesn’t lay pretense to being the best 100 drinks in creation or even a balanced representation of the best drinks in mixological history. Rather, the owners owe up to the list's subjectivity and arbitrary nature. “We at Anvil...
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"New York has played a role in my own bibulous education." [Flickr: ilmungo] New York City has always been a drinking town. From the first taverns of New Amsterdam to the palatial 19th century hotel ballrooms to the Prohibition-era speakeasies and today’s cutting-edge cocktail lounges, New York has always been well prepared to slake the thirsts that come with being one of the world’s greatest cities. Fittingly, after all this time, the city will celebrate its spirituous history at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic on October 3 and 4, the city's first-ever "part festival, part fête, part conference, part cocktail party." The series of seminars, tastings and out-and-out parties (check) will take place at the Astor Center and assorted bars around...
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"Julia Child preferred an Upside-Down Martini, with five times as much dry vermouth as gin in the glass." ©iStockphoto.com/DNY59 You wouldn’t know it by looking at the way it’s used today, but vermouth was the belle of the mixological ball once upon a time. While vermouth can list details such as “revolutionized the late 19th century cocktail” and “enabled creation of the Manhattan and the martini” on its resume, today it's like the elderly greeters at Wal-Mart, picking up whatever gigs it can get in the years that came after the glory ones. While vermouth played a major role in countless cocktails from the Gilded Age and beyond, perhaps no other drink has been as tightly connected to its contemporary...
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"As the category expands, it’s becoming more challenging to navigate the world of gin." Gin gimlet. Photograph from Martin Kimeldorf's Pixel Playground on Flickr In case you haven’t noticed from the gradually expanding selection in the liquor store, gin is on an upswing. Dozens of brands and variations have been introduced in the past decade, and start-up distillers are adding novel gins to their liquor portfolios as the divisions between styles of gin become increasingly blurred. At a time when this gin market growth and a renewed interest in gin-based cocktails have the potential to confuse even the most ardent of enthusiasts, a new book on the spirit has been released by Gaz Regan, one of the most entertaining chroniclers...
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As if I needed yet another excuse to drink Champagne, here comes what may be the prettiest cocktail I've ever seen. The Hungry Mouse demonstrates how to use wild hibiscus flowers in syrup in a Blooming Champagne Cocktail. Just place a preserved hibiscus flower in a Champagne flute, and fill with your bubbly beverage of choice! The flower slowly opens and "blooms" in the glass, making it a beautiful treat that's "a little bit sweet—with just the faintest hint of raspberries."...
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Photograph from Danielle Scott on Flickr Last night around 11 p.m., after the heat had nibbled at the 100-degree mark in Seattle and while my house was still in the toasty mid-80s (we’re not much on air conditioning here in the Pacific Northwest), I decided that while the fan was doing the best job it could in keeping me from melting into a puddle on the couch, stronger action was needed. Fortunately I’d had the foresight to stock up on ice to take the edge off the heat wave we’re experiencing, so I broke out the crusher and prepared a nuclear-gauge heat buster: a Queen’s Park Swizzle. I wrote about the drink last fall, to coincide with a story...
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©iStockphoto.com/jsberry For a spirit that’s earned a reputation over the decades as a skull-thumping, inhibition-be-gone, regret-inducing, everyone-gone-wild kind of drink, tequila is getting a lot of respectable love nowadays. And as Jonathan Miles wrote in last weekend’s New York Times, and as I wrote in the August issue of Wine & Spirits, bartenders are increasingly turning to tequila in their pursuit of new frontiers for mixological exploration. It's been a long time coming. Mostly absent from American bars until the second half of the 20th-century, tequila quickly became a hard-partying kind of drink, and all sorts of alcoholic indiscretions have been blamed on the fiery spirit. As Miles describes it, until recently, "Tequila specials were like petri dishes for...
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Photograph of Cocchi Americano from bava.com It's three days after Tales of the Cocktail wrapped up in New Orleans, and I’m still recovering from the annual five-day gathering that’s become a significant event in the spirits and& cocktails world. While it may still take me several more days to catch up on missed sleep—and I don’t even want to think about what it’s going to take to shed the extra pounds from all the jambalaya, gumbo and oysters I inhaled—the things I saw and tasted at Tales will take me well into the next year of liquid exploration. While sessions with titles such as "Big Trends" tried to address some of the shifts in the drinks world—mescal, cachaca and sherry...
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While I dutifully made my way through the original Star Wars franchise during my preteen years and I managed a few rounds of Dungeons & Dragons before adolescence got in the way, I’ve never gotten very deep into comic books, hobbits, or many of the other things that many folks of my generation have embraced at a level that is, dare I say it, geekish. But as Derek Brown wrote recently on the Atlantic Food Channel, cocktails are an aspect of the culinary world that not only inspire their own level of geekery but even have their own equivalent of a Star Trek convention: Tales of the Cocktail. Now in its seventh year, Tales of the Cocktail attracts thousands of...
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